An Al Sharpton-led memorial service yesterday for Michael Brown, the black 18-year-old thug who gave a white Ferguson, Mo. police officer a severe head injury while trying to seize his handgun, became the grotesque political rally some observers feared it would be.

The distinctly anti-police tone of the service was proof that the lie that Brown tried to surrender to white police officer Darren Wilson, rather than trying to beat the life out of him, won’t die. The racial-grievance industry, egged on by President Obama, won’t let it go.

The Left’s narrative that the nearly 300-lbs. Brown, who had just robbed a convenience store on Aug. 9 mere minutes before encountering decorated policeman Wilson, is under withering evidentiary assault every day. As federal officials scour the riot-torn St. Louis suburb in a desperate search for material to justify federal civil rights charges, Sharpton is pressing on with his campaign to foment race-based hatred.

The funeral sets the stage for the mob-led lynching of Officer Wilson, an outcome eagerly sought by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Missouri’s governor, Jay Nixon (D). Nixon has been covering his left flank in recent days, terrified because activists noticed that he seemed to support law and order and oppose mobocracy, rioting, and looting in the early hours of the crisis that followed Brown’s death. But after criticism from the Left, Nixon, like the Democratic members of the local congressional delegation, wants Wilson indicted, evidence or not.

Brown was remembered at a star-studded Baptist church funeral choreographed by racial grievance profiteer Sharpton. From Hollywood, movie director Spike Lee and actor Wesley Snipes attended the service, along with purported civil rights leader Martin Luther King III, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), a left-wing extremist who believes urban riots constitute legitimate political activism. Lee is on record praying that Ferguson would explode in racial violence. Also in attendance were three officials from the Obama White House — a greater number of representatives than Obama sent to the recent funeral for a murdered brigadier general, the highest-ranking U.S. officer to be killed in a war in decades.

But despite growing evidence suggesting Brown wasn’t such a good kid, Sharpton pontificated that the decedent was a gentle giant who only wanted the best for his fellow human beings.

“Michael Brown does not want to be remembered for a riot. He wants to be remembered as the one that made American deal with how we gonna police in the United States,” Sharpton thundered before a crowd estimated at 4,500, in a eulogy that was more like a spirited pep talk before the Left’s planned lynching of Officer Wilson.

Given that the decedent’s rap music recordings focused on the joys of illicit drug use, criminal violence including rape, and “hos” it is hard to imagine Brown gave much thought to law enforcement best practices.

Sharpton howled that Brown’s body laid out in the street for a whole 90 minutes before a police detective arrived to begin an investigation into the shooting, as if it had been an intentional insult to Brown on the part of racist police:

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And when I saw Michael lying there, I thought about how many of us were just considered nothing. How we were just so marginalized and ignored. Whatever the circumstance an investigation leads to, to have that boy lying there, like nobody cared about him. Like he didn’t have any loved ones, like his life value didn’t matter … I told his grandfather, I don’t care what happened, but whatever we can do I’ll be there to do it.

And if the corpse had been scooped up from the ground right away Sharpton and his ilk would now be screaming that the evidence hadn’t been properly preserved by bungling Keystone Kops who didn’t care if a dead black man got justice.

Sharpton also showed his paranoid side, ranting that people were coming after African-Americans because of their “blackness”:

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So that they are justifying trying to come at us because some of us act like the definition of blackness is how low you can go. Blackness has never been about being a gangster or thug. Blackness was no matter how low we was pushed down, we rose up anyhow. Blackness was never surrendering our pursuit of excellence. It was when it was against the law to go to some schools, we built black colleges and learned anyhow.

At one point in the address, Sharpton shouted:

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America, it’s time to deal with policing! We are not the haters, we’re the healers!

What does it require of us? We can’t have a fit; we’ve got to have a movement. A fit you get mad and run out for a couple of nights. A movement means we’ve got to be here for the long haul, and turn our chants into change, our demonstration into legislation, we have got to stay on this so we can stop this.

After Brown died violence erupted in Ferguson, Sharpton said, pretending not to approve of said violence. With no obvious oratorical segue, Sharpton screamed:

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This is not about you! This is about justice! This is about fairness! And America is going to have to come to terms when there’s something wrong that we have money to give military equipment to police forces, but we don’t have money for training, and money for public education, and money to train our children!

Which is what it is all about for Sharpton: the money.

Shakedowns are the name of the game for Sharpton and his group, National Action Network, whose motto is the cry of the rioter, “No justice, no peace.”

Every time a black person dies tragically, especially when it happens in a newsworthy way, Sharpton sees dollar signs — and his business partner, Barack Obama, sees votes.